One of my favorite events of the year is coming up December 7-8, 2017, San Francisco.

For the last 3 VRX events 4D Pipeline has supported the organizers as a partner and speaker/panelist. This year, Tyler, our managing partner and cofounder will be chairing the panel for - Applying VR/AR for use in Enterprise.

The entire VRX event is great for VR, AR, MR, and practical real applications of it.

If you would like a discount code, contact me and sign up soon while it's still valid - jed(at)4Dpipeline(dot)com

Tyler's, session is a great opportunity to hear from industry experts from VANS/VR, Gulfstream, and Ford.

Applying VR/AR for use in Enterprise.

Hear from some of the leading industry experts on how VR, AR and MR are taking hold for enterprise across a huge variety of industries. Our panel will explore how the new wave of immersive tech is providing viable cost saving and increased revenue in Automotive, Aerospace, Manufacturing, Retail, Apparel and other industry verticals.

We'll be looking at VR and AR opportunities throughout the product lifecycle, including use cases in product design, simulation, manufacturing, sales & marketing, retail, service and support and more. The panel will address the following:

Challenges of VR/AR/MR in the enterprise

What particular ROI are to be expected?

How to assess if VR/AR is a good fit to the problem at hand

You’ll get specific examples from our panel (the good, the bad, the ugly) to formulate your own guide to assessing if VR/AR/MR is a good fit for the challenges you face.

Apple CEO Tim Cook told us that augmented reality would change everything, and now we have a better idea of exactly what he meant. A new report reveals that Apple is already hard at work on a rear-facing 3D sensor for the iPhone that would vastly expand the iPhone's AR capabilities by allowing it to interact with the rest of the world in AR beyond selfies and Animoji. Citing anonymous sources familiar with the development, Bloomberg claims that Apple's new rear-facing sensor would not use the same front-facing, TrueDepth camera system currently employed by the iPhone X. Rather, it would use

Jed Fisher's insight:

Pppppplllleassseeee please please!

This to me is the one big missing hardware piece for game changing Augmented Reality. Using this we get HoloLens AR quality and can match 3D to the realworld automatically for complex and integrated AR.

AWE, the world's largest AR+VR conference and expo. Munich Europe October 19-20, 2017.

I had a great time attending the Augmented World Expo in Munich (www.aweeu.com). This is the first time AWE has been in Europe and Munich was a great choice. Munich is where Metaio was based (purchased by Apple) and is near to the headquarters of BMW, AUDI, Porsche, and others. Munich is also my former home so of course i’m very fond of it being there!

It was a two day event, day one was about AR technology, use cases and how to implement AR in your processes. Day 2 was more content and pitches (startups in the AR space).

Audi had a strong presense at the event with insights into how and where they use AR and VR. Also companies like Lockheed Martin and Coca-Cola.

All the tech providers were there, Vuforia of course, so too were Wikitudes, VisionLab, ViewAR, Bosch, and many others. For headsets, we saw many HoloLens, and booths by Meta, ODG, Vuzix, Epson, Daqri, and others.

The exciting Avegant https://www.avegant.com/video-headset was there. Everyone was super keen to see their light field technology (this allows the user to focus on different points of view - something far away and then something close (something AR has trouble with)). Avegant is special because i think it’s doing one of the things that Magic Leap might be working on.

Some fun highlights of the show: I liked the Massless pen! I think this is a really nice concept that not only lets people write in 3D but lets them manipulate the environment (like a mouse does in 2D). Another fun surprise was seeing Prezi AR - although i’m a avid Prezi fan i did not know they had an AR version! The Nvidia Holodeck is also great if you havent had a chance to try it.

An interesting new company i had not come across was Insidernavigation. It’s just that - navigation solution for inside buildings, delivering AR to mobile phones without special hardware. Another new one was Diota. It came recommended and they indeed had some good SLAM technology. Unfortunately entirely closed ecosystem and they actually say they do not intend to expose any SDK or API, they want everything done by them….

Smartphones’ GPS systems are going to start getting a lot more accurate. According to IEEE Spectrum, Broadcom is starting to make a mass-market GPS chip that can pinpoint a device’s accurac

Jed Fisher's insight:

Great news for GPS but even better news for Augmented Reality. Having this allows us to walk around a construction site (and the like) and "see through walls" (seeing pipes/electricals/etc) of building that are work-in-progress and the like. When you know the person's exact location we can drive down the augmented building and graphics based on the users GPS location. Super excited about this!

Magic Leap, the mysterious AR startup with a multiple-billion dollar valuation, still doesn’t have a headset to show the world, but in a recent paper published by Magic Leap researchers entitled Toward Geometric Deep SLAM, we get a peek into a novel machine vision technique that aims to bring the company closer to their goal of creating a …

Jed Fisher's insight:

Two predictions from me today :-)

1) My wish (and slight prediction (although i'm sure others are saying the same thing)) for today's Apple event is that the iPhoneX has a 3D camera which works like Google Tango. This combined with Apple's ARKit will allows for much much much better AR. Plus, indirectly, it allows for a host of new algorithms to be developed for things like "Deep SLAM" tracking. Regardless, tracking using the phone will soon reach the Hololens type level (pretty darn good). This then really does take AR prime time.

Now, if/when we have this. I'm really starting to feel that Magic Leap may end up being too late to the party... We've already got mixed reality headsets like Hololens, Meta, and soon others. The tracking of these is pretty good and getting better and better. Soon more phones will have similar level tracking with 3D cameras. What can Magic Leap still do that hasnt been done? Better tracking and automatic identification? (maybe), better hardware headset (maybe).

My second, "big" prediction for Magic Leap is it will do social augmented gaming (locational based) really well. for example - play tag (tip) (chasings) together (wearing headsets) with an augmented character in your real environment - things like this. This would be very cool.

AMD has announced its free ray-tracing engine ProRender will run within Blender, as well as Maya, 3ds Max, and SolidWorks. AMD says ProRender uses a physically-based workflow, which allows multiple materials to be expressed in a single, lighting-independent shader, making it easy to color objects and have them usable in any sensible environment.

Jed Fisher's insight:

Exciting to be in the theatre when AMD announced this at Siggraph. We've seen first hand the power and visual quality of Radeon ProRender and with plugins to SOLIDWORKS, Blender, Maya, and 3ds Max it is likely to make this a good choice for those seeking a new physical raytracing renderer. Great writeup and summary as always by GFXSpeak.

Apple announced a new development platform , dubbed ARKit, that will let developers create AR experiences on the iPhone and iPad. ARKit will be incorporated deep into iOS 11 that will give help Apple to create the "largest AR platform in the world"

Jed Fisher's insight:

What an awesome month for AR - first Facebook's big announcements for AR and VR and now Apple's!

Apple we knew was working on AR (after they acquired Metaio) and all of Tim Cook's comments and the implications that glasses might be even coming. But we were not expecting to see an ARKit so soon!

- there’s Visual Inertial Odometry, which will let ARKit track the world, and for this it will fuse camera sensor data with CoreMotion data <Jed's comment - this totally makes sense and should also help finally make perfect 360 stitching>

- and then there is the “Scene Understanding and Lighting Estimation”, which Apple says will let the ARKit analyse the scene based on the camera view, and then find “horizontal planes like tables and floors, and can track and place objects on smaller feature points as well.”

<Jed's comment - faaaaaaawwwwkkkk me :-) super happy about this and what a nice surprise. This is going to serious help improve AR experiences for just about everyone who wants AR>

Yup, it's been a good month for Augmented Reality! (and all of those with Apple devices!)

We are going to hold a special talk by Jed Fisher who has done a lot of real-world AR/VR projects. Here is a bit of his Bio:
Jed is a cofounder and Managing Partner of 4D Pipeline, a digital product design and strategy firm which helps startups and global 100's make great products people love. Specializing in Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, we...

You might have seen the very cool simulation of Portal in Hololens recently. White it demonstrated the ways in which Microsoft’s augmented reality device could replicate the video game’s mechanic of launching objects through portals, it didn’t allow the user to walk through the portals themselves. “HoleLenz Gate” does exactly that and it’s bad for people who are afraid of heights.

Developer Kei Voxel has been tinkering with this impressive experiment for a while now. You can see a compilation of his progress in the video below. But be warned, that it might cause a sinking feeling in your stomach. The holes in the floor certainly appear dangerous but when the user walks through the portal into a whole other location overlooking a mountain range, it becomes clear that this is some next level tech.

Jed Fisher's insight:

Very trippy, very clever, and i'm guessing very "magic leap" like. Nice to see people showing this stuff off in Hololens!

A new report suggests that Apple's AR headset could start shipping in 2020 with brand new components and a new operating system,

Jed Fisher's insight:

Two Apple scoops in one day. Both super exciting.

If Apple does this my bet is on them over a Magic Leap. What Apple will bring almost automatically is the Platform (Apps + Developers) plus the Marketing and Sales arm. With these things Magic Leap on it's own has no chance, maybe they get bought by Google but even so Google doesnt have a great record with these things. Regardless, one day it will be nice to sit down on the beach and have the entire beach crowd look up at a giant whale flying in the sky (the image Magic Leap used in their marketing (which i think there is no way they will deliver on anytime soon) (i.e. light glasses, compute power, web connected, ... ).

Amazon today is introducing a new feature called AR View that lets customers visualize online products in their own living space, using their smartphone..

Jed Fisher's insight:

Are you in Retail? Manufacturing? AEC?

Do you have a clear digital experience plan (that leverages Augmented Reality)? If not - you probably should be considering one.

We've seen IKEA, Target, and Amazon doing it. At 4D Pipeline we help global 1000s and fast growing startups do more with AR, VR, and realtime 3D. Our customers include some of the worlds best. Contact me to find out more how AR can help your company do more..

Find out why the best of the best choose 4D Pipeline

My company, 4D Pipeline, is a strategy, design, and development firm. We help companies build great products people love. Specializing in 3D, VR, AR, Apps, and Web.

Our Customers include some of the "best of the best" such as IKEA, VANS, AUDI, BMW Mini,AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, Xerox PARC, Unity Technologies, Dassault Systèmes,Simplygon, SolidWorks, Honeywell, Panasonic, and many other leading brands (both startups and Global 1000s). We've 225+ projects under our belt and over 70 satisfied customers around the world.

We've help build great Apps, VR/AR/3D experiences, CAD converters/importers/exporters, plugins, automation tools, and many more things.

AWE, the world's largest AR+VR conference and expo, returns to Europe October 19-20, 2017 in its second year for AWE Europe. This year AWE EU is hosted at the MOC in Munich, Germany.

Join 1,500 professionals including a mix of CEOs, CTOs, designers, developers, producers, engineers, futurists, analysts, investors, and top press in a fantastic opportunity coming together to learn, inspire, partner, and experience first hand the most exciting industry of our times.

Jed Fisher's insight:

Ping me to arrange a meetup with 4D Pipeline and find out why the best of the best choose to work with us. Also ping me for a special (limited) 45% discount!!

There aren't many big players in AR right now, but Meta can count itself as one of them. It has the technology. It has the growing developer community.…

Jed Fisher's insight:

Here at 4D Pipeline we've been doing loads of HoloLens experiences and have accomplished some amazing things. That said, I've been really impressed with the Meta tech and am looking forward to doing more with it.

Here at 4D Pipeline we've been doing loads of HoloLens experiences and have accomplished some amazing things. That said, I've been really impressed with the Meta tech and am looking forward to doing more with it.

Here at 4D Pipeline we've been doing loads of HoloLens experiences and have accomplished some amazing things. That said, I've been really impressed with the Meta tech and am looking forward to doing more with it.

Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) have released the MaterialX Library for computer graphics. MaterialX is an open standard developed by Lucasfilm’s Advanced Development Group and ILM engineers to improve the transfer of rich materials and look-development content between applications and renderers.

Jed Fisher's insight:

This is pretty major really. The world of 3D graphics and downstream 3D has suffered greatly from the lack of open materials and raytracing software. Recently AMD has announced Radeon ProRender raytracer (to be open sourced) and now Lucas and ILM have opened sourced their material standard, MaterialX.

Good days ahead for the exchange of realistic and non realistic materials and shaders!

Tech giants including Baidu and Google spent between $20B to $30B on AI in 2016, with 90% of this spent on R&D and deployment, and 10% on AI acquisitions. AI investment has turned into a race for patents and intellectual property (IP) among the world’s leading tech companies.

Last week at Facebook’s F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg went all in on augmented reality (AR).

What’s (probably) in the box?

If we analyze for a moment what was introduced during the talk, the technologies that are inside this new platform are probably the following:

Cross platform monocular SLAM. This is what gives you the ability to walk around an object placed in the environment.

Monocular structure from motion. This builds a 3D representation locally of some portions of the real world inside the phone, allowing you to do things like occlusion (putting virtual things behind real things).

Robust loop closure. When Mark talked about “leaving notes” for others, robust loop closure is what you need to enable that. Effectively it lets the system “remember” where these notes are left simply by looking at the environment.

Object recognition. Understanding what objects are in the real world and then allowing you to give contextual data around them.

Authoring and development tool. This is the biggest piece of the puzzle and would potentially allow anyone to create AR experiences with a very low bar of entry.

For any group of developers, any one of these tasks is monumental but tractable with the right team, funding, and partnerships. But rolling out all of these tasks in a seamless package that can work at scale is nearly impossible.

Read more

Jed Fisher's insight:

This is pretty phenomenal, probably the biggest boost to AR since AR started. It's got SLAM and 3D effects, it's got a lot. It means marketing solutions are going to flock to this platform. Well done Facebook. Your move Apple!

Acer may be the first to start shipping an inexpensive, quality headset for Windows developers -- but this $300 device is no HoloLens.

Jed Fisher's insight:

Real shame they do not have a transparent visor but great they are all the same software. Microsoft has always been about building platforms so i'm glad to see they are opening this up. Looking forward to giving it a play shortly.

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